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Easter Blessings + Take My Hand (new poetry video) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Take My Hand Please don’t plant me neat rows of rosebushes and tulips at attention, no manicured gardens or crystal vases of cut stems. Instead, take my hand, lead me onto rain-softened grass which undulates like a boat on a summer lake, lie down with me in a quilt of sunlight and shadows among yellow petals, violet trumpets, a feast for hares and bees, let’s linger and forget ourselves until even the tiled sky above is cracked open by stars and all that is restless and wild within us can roam the heavens howling the moon aloft. —Christine Valters Paintner,

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April 21, 2019

Featured Poet: Dorothy Walters

We are launching a new series this spring with poets whose work we love and want to feature! Our next poet is Dorothy Walters whose work is deeply inspired by sacred ecstasy and “the Beloved Within.”  You can hear Dorothy reading her poem “The Transition” below and read more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred. Seekers  “What you seek was seeking you.” Rumi How is it that when I was looking for You, You were seeking me also? Silently You watched and waited. Sometimes gave me a brief glimpse or taste of who You were, like a shy

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April 17, 2019

Monk in the World Guest Post: Anne Marie Walsh

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Anne Marie Walsh’s reflection, “Deep Within.” Silent retreats, generally considered “time apart”, also point a way for me to be contemplative in the world moment to moment. Sometimes I arrive in exhaustion, feeling there is no time even for this retreat, what was I thinking, how on earth is this going to help? But allowing the sure footedness of the decision to come, now after many such retreats, I know it is a great gift to enter

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April 10, 2019

Vespers (New Poetry Video) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Vespers The sun slides down the gap between houses its amber reach crosses the grass toward me, shadow of the elder tree has grown long and I remember under the mulberry spectacle of sky how everything I love must end: this cup of tea with steam ascending, the dog curled right against me, your warm hands over mine, how this sweet leaving of day makes me draw the world as close as possible. —Christine Valters Paintner (*originally published in U.S. Catholic magazine) Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, The poem above is part of a series of poems I wrote to

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April 7, 2019

Featured Poet: Laurie Klein

We are launching a new series this spring with poets whose work we love and want to feature! Our next poet is Laurie Klein whose work is deeply inspired by mystery and the healing that comes from courting holy disruption. You can hear Laurie reading her poem “How to Live Like a Backyard Psalmist” below and read more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred. How to Live Like a Backyard Psalmist  Wear shoes with soles like meringue and pale blue stitching so that every day you feel ten years old. Befriend what crawls. Drink rain, hatless, laughing. Sit

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April 3, 2019

Monk in the World Guest Post: Beverly Dame

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Beverly Dame’s reflection on living by and leaving the river. For five years, I lived on the bank of a small Canadian river.  For someone who had always been a city-dweller even as a child, it was rather like being at camp twelve months a year. The river’s calm waters led us to name our cottage “Stillwaters” because like the psalmist God had led us to them. The seasons were read on the face of the river.

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March 27, 2019

St. Gobnait and the Place of Her Resurrection (new poem video) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

St. Gobnait and the Place of Her Resurrection On the tiny limestone island an angel buzzes to Gobnait in a dream, disrupts her plans, sends her in search of nine white deer. She wanders for miles across sea and land until at last they appear and rather than running toward them she falls gently to wet ground, sits in silence as light crawls across sky, lets their long legs approach and their soft, curious noses surround her. Breathing slowly, she slides back onto grass and clover and knows nothing surpasses this moment, a heaven of hooves and dew. Is there

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March 24, 2019

Featured Poet: Susan Millar DuMars

We are launching a new series this spring with poets whose work we love and want to feature! Our next poet is Susan Millar DuMars whose work is deeply inspired by the fragility of the human body and the yearning for God. You can hear Susan reading her poem “Undiscovered” below and read more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred. Undiscovered We lie together quietly in our big boat of a bed. His toenail, kneecap, hipbone, the warm, wet tang of him. The familiar soft spell of his voice. Now that I’ve seen death, I don’t know how

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March 20, 2019

The Feast of St. Patrick and the Spring Equinox ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Holy Mountain* I want to climb the holy mountain ascend over weight of stone and force of gravity, follow the rise of a wide and cracked earth toward eternal sky, measured steps across the sharp path, rest often to catch my heavy breath. I want to hear the silence of stone and stars, lie back on granite’s steep rise face to silver sky’s glittering points where I can taste the galaxies on my tongue, communion of fire, then stand on the summit and look out at the laboring world. I want to witness earth’s slow turning with early light brushing

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March 17, 2019

Monk in the World Guest Post: Michelle Kobriger

I’m delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World Guest Post Series from the community. Read on for Michelle Kobriger’s reflection on the artist and beginning again. Winter came on hard and fast this year, the colorful autumnal display fading quickly to brown. Days of wind and rain stripped the trees, carpeting my favorite woodsy trail in a thick layer of crunchy leaves. Tromping down the path a day after heavy rains, showers of acorns plopped to the ground like fat raindrops as squirrels scurried to gather the bountiful harvest. I don’t know what it would

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March 13, 2019